5 - Catholic worship

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Catholicism is not merely a belief system. While it is true, as we will develop at length in the next chapter, that there are criteria for the basic beliefs of the Church set out in the rule of faith, it is equally true that Catholicism is also a worshiping community and not simply a movement with a collection of ideas or concepts. The relationship between worship and belief is, in the Catholic understanding of things, symbiotic: What we believe is expressed in how we worship as a Church.

As we have already noted, the New Testament word for church – ekklesia – means a gathered congregation. The New Testament succinctly sets out the reasons for that coming together as an ekklesia: “They [i.e. the early Christian community] devoted themselves to the teachings of the Apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers” (Acts 2:42). In that terse description we see that the gathered community first received the apostolic preaching and teaching and, in the second place “broke the bread” and prayed, which is to say, they engaged in a form of ritual activity (“broke the bread” is a shorthand description in the New Testament for the eucharist), and they offered prayers to God.

This chapter will focus particularly on the formal worship of the Church, which frequently is referred to as the liturgy. The word “liturgy” comes from a Greek word leitourgia, which originally meant, roughly, a public work.